I’m not a super-savvy user. Can someone explain to me why I should care about X vs Wayland? Everything seems to work with X, and as I’ve just read, many programs don’t support Wayland. So will this transition just lead to lots of broken software once someone decides they won’t ship with X by default anymore?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

X is broken and the people who understand it at a deep level are pretty much all dead. What's worse is that the code base is massive and doesn't follow modern code practices.

Wayland is different as there is no codebase. It is simply a set of standards that allow apps to connect to a desktop.

The X model:

App -> window manager -> X server -> hardware

The Wayland model:

App -> desktop -> hardware

This sounds like it wouldn't be that big of improvement but unlike X Wayland is designed to take advantage of the modern GPU horse power. X was originally designed to run on UNIX mainframes so to make it run like it does took a bunch of Jacky work arounds.

[–] jsonjson -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Many of the people that maintain X are the same people working on Wayland implementations. They're pushing people towards the new thing because it makes their lives easier, and that's also the nature of engineer driven product development, it's not going to consider all the edge cases underserved from replacing legacy software because there's nobody to keep them in check.

Edit: Guess the thought police decided my factual information isn't welcome here because it goes against their feefees.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are people working on X?

[–] jsonjson 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah, there's maintenance and security patching, otherwise distros wouldn't be packaging it...

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